Research

Research

The future of telecommunications policy in a converged digital broadband world; definitional and ethical aspects of gamification (digital game design techniques in business); implications of massive open online courses (MOOCs) as a new form of learning.

Nearly fifty years after FCC Chairman Newton Minow blasted broadcast television as a "vast wasteland," the FCC has the opportunity create a verdant new oasis of wireless connectivity. The long-dormant “white spaces” around broadcast TV channels may soon be opened to new forms of communication. The question is how the regulator should allocate these spaces: through more-flexible versions of the exclusive licenses granted to broadcasters, or through inclusive mechanisms that allow for broader access. The FCC has proposed to make the white spaces available on an unlicensed basis, meaning that any device meeting technical requirements could operate there.
The best solution is to consider the problem of gridlock in the broadcast bands holistically. Both exclusive property rights and unlicensed allocation can play synergistic roles.
The debate over what to do with the white spaces illustrates persistent misunderstandings about both wireless spectrum and property rights. Communications policy scholars agree that broadcasting represents a tragedy of the anticommons: a government-engendered misallocation of property rights, resulting in under-consumption of a valuable resource. They disagree about almost everything else.
Advocates of exclusive spectrum rights go astray by insisting, incorrectly, that spectrum itself is the scarce physical resource. The anticommons model sheds light on why this viewpoint is flawed. Both exclusion and inclusion have a place in spectrum policy, but only a commons approach can unlock the potential of the white spaces. This article uses the broadcast white spaces to analyze the nature of spectrum property rights and the potential for tragedies of the commons and anticommons.

Communications networks are the basic infrastructure of the digital age. The future of news, business, interaction, entertainment, health care, education, and many other areas will be built on top of these platforms. Network infrastructure is the dividing line between the old physical economy of scarcity and the new information economy of abundance. The legal framework for networks will therefore shape not only the telecommunications businesses that provide connectivity, but also the applications, services, content, and user activities that depend on it.
Unfortunately, communications networks are entering a vast legal grey area. As telecommunications and media converge into the Internet, they are escaping from the regulatory frameworks of the Communications Act of 1934. In its effort to engage the Internet, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulatory agency responsible for communications, has backed its way into a dead-end statutory theory that provides insufficient basis for effective regulation.
The solution lies within the Communications Act itself, but not where the FCC and others have been looking. The essential requirement for a flourishing network infrastructure platform is open interconnection. By locating its authority to regulate the Internet in its obligations to oversee interconnection under Title II of the Communications Act, the FCC could reorient communications law for the challenges of a new era.

This article envisions the foundational infrastructure for a true wireless Internet. The domain name system (DNS) for addressing allowed the Internet to scale as a decentralized, loosely-coupled system. A similar system for the wireless communication would allow devices to negotiate frequently assignments and other attributes dynamically. The traditional, static approach to spectrum allocation creates massive inefficiencies, which will become increasingly problematic as wireless demand grows. A DNS for spectrum could be based on the database the Federal Communications Commission recently mandated for devices operating in the “White Spaces” around broadcast television channels. Such an infrastructure would enable rapid growth and innovation in next-generation mobile devices and applications.

As digital networks proliferate, standardized interfaces will define the economic and normative dynamics of markets. In other words, standardization is regulation. Regulatory mechanisms must evolve to emulate the best aspects of the standard-setting process. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should remake itself as a standards organization. Instead of viewing standardization as peripheral to its core mission, the FCC should catalyze adoption of open standards that promote its regulatory objectives.
A standards-based approach offers better solutions to the novel issues the FCC now faces, such as network management practices of broadband access providers and unlicensed wireless devices adjacent to broadcast television frequencies. Scholars have begun to appreciate the importance of technical standards in regulating the behavior of communications and information technology firms. However, they have only considered possibilities in which government either subsumes or defers to private standards-setting bodies. This article shows how regulators can see themselves as participants in the standards marketplace. Such an approach will allow the FCC to provide necessary "safe harbors" for development of technical solutions to important public policy disputes.

Two forces are in tension as the Internet evolves. One pushes toward interconnected common platforms; the other pulls toward fragmentation and proprietary alternatives. Their interplay drives many of the contentious issues in cyberlaw, intellectual property, and telecommunications policy, including the fight over network neutrality for broadband providers, debates over global Internet governance, and battles over copyright online. These are more than just conflicts between incumbents and innovators, or between openness and deregulation. Their roots lie in the fundamental dynamics of interconnected networks.
Fortunately, there is an interdisciplinary literature on network properties, albeit one virtually unknown to legal scholars. The emerging field of network formation theory explains the pressures threatening to pull the Internet apart, and suggests responses. The Internet as we know it is surprisingly fragile. To continue the extraordinary outpouring of creativity and innovation that the Internet fosters, policy-makers must protect its composite structure against both fragmentation and excessive concentration of power.
This paper, the first to apply network formation models to Internet law, shows how the Internet pulls itself together as a coherent whole. This very process, however, creates and magnifies imbalances that encourage balkanization. By understanding how networks behave, governments and other legal decision-makers can avoid unintended consequences and target their actions appropriately. A network-theoretic perspective holds great promise to inform the law and policy of the information economy.

There are two kinds of legal rules for communications networks, such as the Internet and the telephone system. Interconnection rules define how and when networks must exchange traffic with each other, and non-discrimination rules prevent networks from favoring some customers' traffic over others. Each approach has unique strengths and weaknesses. The distinction has never been fully appreciated, even though regulators have imposed both requirements many times.
Non-discrimination questions predominate in communications and Internet policy today, thanks to the high-profile battle over "network neutrality" rules for broadband networks. Yet both sides in the network neutrality debate are mistaken. The central challenge of our era of digital convergence is not non-discrimination, but interconnection. Technological and marketplace developments threaten to undermine the open connectivity that feeds the Internet's extraordinary dynamism. A renewed emphasis on interconnection could better address the concerns that animate the network neutrality debate. At the same time, it could avert a disastrous balkanization of the Internet, which otherwise looms as a real possibility.
In short, non-discrimination was crucial in the old era of scarcity; interconnection is the essential input of the new age of abundance. The central mandate for the emerging field of network infrastructure policy should be the one eloquently articulated by E.M. Forster: Only connect.

We live in a world of increasingly universal connectivity. Yet our legal system presumes that people are isolated from one another. In a diverse array of doctrinal areas, law encodes the assumption that direct tracking of individual activities is the exception, rather than the rule. With the diffusion of new technologies, this expectation will be undermined.
A profusion of networked sensors will pose novel challenges for many areas of the law. Hundreds of millions of camera-enabled mobile phones and networked webcams are already in the hands of individuals throughout the world. Billions of wireless radio-frequency identification tags will soon be deployed. Location-sensing capabilities will be built into a growing range of equipment. Intelligent handheld digital devices will turn every individual into a networked information gathering and dissemination point. Inadvertent private actions, rather than conscious government surveillance, will increasingly dominate the tracking and monitoring of the physical world and its inhabitants.
A common initial response will be to ban or restrict the technologies that threaten settled expectations. Yet the sensors will not be stopped so easily. In the end, social norms will define the canvas upon which law operates to regulate information exchanges. Against that backdrop, law will gradually evolve to accommodate changed circumstances. The best way to avoid conflicts and uncertainties along the way will be to surface the hidden assumptions that technology is calling into question.

Fifty years ago, two great technologies, the telecommunications network and the computer, embarked on a collision course. Experts at the time speculated about a “computer utility” that would profoundly influence both business and society. Not long after, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began to grapple with this convergence of computing and communications. The FCC’s actions in the late 1960s and early 1970s shaped the future of both industries. Today, digitization and consolidation have erased old boundaries. The rise of remote network-based applications and storage, or "cloud computing," is shifting the balance in the data world from distributed edge systems to centralized networked platforms. Something very much like the old computer utility vision is coming back into focus. Now is the time to return to and update the FCC’s original convergence agenda. As the technical predictions of 1960s visionaries become real, the policy considerations they raised must also be taken seriously.

Courses

Current

LGST612 - Responsibility in Professional Services

This course uses a professional services context to introduce students to important ethical and legal challenges they will face as leaders in such fields as financial services, health care, real estate, and consulting. However, the scope is not limited to these contexts and will be equally useful to students preparing for any managerial position that is likely to place them in advisory and/or agency roles owing duties to employers, clients, suppliers, and customers. Although coverage will vary depending on instructor, the focus of the course will be on developing skills in ethical and legal analyses that can assist managers as they make both individual-level and firm-level decisions about the responsible courses of action when duties, loyalties, rules, norms, and interests are in conflict. For example, the rules of insider trading may form the basis for lessons in some sections.

Group assignments, role-plays, and case studies may, at the instructor's discretion, be used to help illustrate the basic theoretical frameworks. The type of thematic question the course may address is whether management can or should be considered a "profession" in the ways that law and medicine are. In some sections, students will form "industry groups" representing different service sectors. These groups will research and present critiques of existing ethical codes as well as draft their own individual "personal codes of conduct" based on course materials and industry norms, as well as personal and/or religious values

Previous

LGST240 - Gamification for Business

Gamification means using the techniques of digital game design to serve business and social impact objectives. The video game industry is now bigger than Hollywood because well-designed games take advantage of both technology and psychology. Gamification takes the elements of games and applies them to real-world environments. Major companies and fast-growing startups now use it in marketing, human resources, innovation processes, healthand wellness, education, and customer engagement.

LGST612 - Responsibility in Professional Services

This course uses a professional services context to introduce students to important ethical and legal challenges they will face as leaders in such fields as financial services, health care, real estate, and consulting. However, the scope is not limited to these contexts and will be equally useful to students preparing for any managerial position that is likely to place them in advisory and/or agency roles owing duties to employers, clients, suppliers, and customers. Although coverage will vary depending on instructor, the focus of the course will be on developing skills in ethical and legal analyses that can assist managers as they make both individual-level and firm-level decisions about the responsible courses of action when duties, loyalties, rules, norms, and interests are in conflict. For example, the rules of insider trading may form the basis for lessons in some sections.

LGST621 - The Government and Legal Environment of Business

This course provides students with a basic understanding of how the law and the political process affect business strategy and decision making. It is co-taught by faculty from the Departments of Legal Studies & Business Ethics and Business & Public Policy. Topics include how legal infrastructure (contracts, intellectual property, antitrust, etc.) affect business strategy, and how businesses deal with challenges involving government agencies, legislation, or the press. The course presents broadly applicable frameworks that will help students to manage and advise clients more effectively in a world heavily influenced by legal concerns and governmental forces.

Why can't work be fun? And just what is fun, anyway? Leading firms are answering that question through a new business practice called gamification. They are using the techniques of digital game designers to serve objectives as varied as marketing, human resources management, innovation, health and wellness, education, and customer engagement. This course, the first of its kind, examines the mechanisms of gamification and provides an understanding of their effective use.